by Miller
We are, after all, human.
There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.
Occasionally I catch a glimpse of my reflection. I see – suddenly and shockingly – what I have become. A shuffling grey beard on fragile, bandy legs with a gaping guillotine tooth and a smile that shocks even its owner.
I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. It could have been worse. I could have been worse.
The wall flashes. Message from Beatrice. She’s coming over with her long fingers and again I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. This grey beard. That jagged tooth. This girl, this woman, this old lady, still attached to me, still holding this claw after all this time.
After the pigs I retreated.
I collect. I file. I archive. Sthembiso keeps me at it. He won’t let me stop, and he pays real attention, making sure I don’t follow my growing instinct just to form piles. I cross-reference and I cross-index and there are about seven of the little buggers who do what I say, even though no one ever goes in there. Ever. And of course there’s that fucking statue of me mounted at the front of it. The plaque has some ridiculous shit about the wizardry of knowledge and learning. Sthembiso made a speech and everyone cried, myself included. It’s strange how sentimental the years make you – even when you’re being screwed, even when you can feel the very twist, you remain pathetically vulnerable to the things you know are hurting you, must be hurting you, are actually making you sick.
Ego.
I have great-great-grandchildren – too many to count, too many names to try to file and match with faces. Their parents bring them to sit on my knee and I pat their heads and tell them whatever I can remember about a life I have pretty much forgotten myself.
They look up expectantly, following the eyes of their parents, as if I have some knowledge, some great thing to give, and that they must therefore per force receive, but are not sure how. Of course I do, I have great things, but they’re all locked up in this head and none can be put to use now. But still … still … I like them, the little ones, and some I even love – certain names and faces stick in my heart and these I favour with what little I have to offer.
Camille Paglia sits on my lap most afternoons. She’s about sixteen now and my hope is that we manage somehow to time the demise so as to leave this thing together. Can a cat be the true love of a human’s life? The one great and enduring emotional connection? As inured as I am to death – and life, for that matter – there is something about Camille and me, about how we live, that makes me want to weep. We are so close as to be welded. Of all the beings I have known and loved, she tops the list. I don’t say that lightly.
Camille is an African special, a cross of a multitude of continental feline influences, from the lion to the pet shop. Her markings are a mix of brown swirls and black accents, a shocking white chest plate and equally crisp white half-socks. She was born to Caesar and Condeleza, cats Mary secured for her first kids and who bred furiously (the cats, I mean) once they had settled into domestic life.
I couldn’t resist. She was sitting there waiting in that kitten box, calm and studied, and I picked her up and took her home.
Now we are together and we observe. I tell her what I think and she’s dismissive of most of it – but still she listens. She seems to have a natural respect for the interaction itself, and at my age I value that as much as anything else.
Of course Madala influenced my view of cats profoundly. If the trees and the plants are brothers, if the birds are my sisters, then cats are truly my kin. Maybe this was his one genuine legacy to me, his gift. The recognition of life in its widest sense.
So Camille sits on my lap, or next to me in her chair, or in the late-afternoon balcony sun. We watch the world drift by. I ruminate and she hums along. My thoughts and my memories and my ideas and my ambitions are all the same river now. Things that were so distinct in their time – in my time – but now they are simply confluence.
North, as far as my eyes can see, is the jungle. The tops of the Killarney Mall and the Sandton skyline are just visible, but now they are genuinely inaccessible for anyone other than jungle adventurers – kids with machetes and a will to explore and discover what once was. The likes of me will forever be elevated on this island, looking out and marvelling over what has become.
South is all decay: broken, sagging buildings, falling bricks and cracking roads. The city has sagged so much now as to be a jungle of its own kind – more accessible than the north but equally dangerous with its packs of dogs and other scavengers and its rain-soaked structural weaknesses. To the west the land has taken back its original desert form, Roodepoort still standing as a dusty, crumbling monument to a dusty, crumbled people. The east runs away to mountains and bush, rivers and seas, depending on whether you go up or down.
They keep coming to talk to me, the kids, to explain how much easier it could be in one of the other places. Soweto maybe, where they have taken the Calabash. Where they are resourced and free and clear, unencumbered by the forest. But there is the inescapable fact of the library, my archive. It is simply not movable, although they’re starting to talk about that too. Restructuring. Resource control. Things I thought had died with the old world that have turned out to be very much alive. I tell them to get lost – they will move and change and grow and integrate and whatever else is necessary when they find Camille and myself bones in the air. We all know.
Until then, they can leave me here looking out over my forest. Really I think they’re just after change for change’s sake – there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our farm. It is central and well stocked and self-sufficient. It might be a little leafy, a little lush, but that’s no reason to move the whole thing. There are buildings aplenty and … ag, no matter. It’s not my business any more.
Babalwa is dead. That fact was one of the hardest to process and it remains a daily challenge dealing with the sight of Fats walking the never-ending yards. He stops all the time, caught contemplating simple physical things. Trees and walls and stumps and lumps. I know his feeling. That feeling. The loss. I miss her too.
Javas is also dead. His was an easier departure to bear. I always perceived Javas as a larger-than-life force – as an essence. His presence extended beyond bodies and words and locations, and so I feel like he’s still with us. With me. I talk to him and I reply on his behalf, which I know is a sign of my own slipping functioning, but I’m willing to accept that.
Ironically, Javas spent his last years working small. As the kids brought the giants into their story of us, as his work was used to represent us, the originators, he pulled away and focused inward. He worked in his little studio inside his and Andile’s garden cottage and few were invited in.
Once, about a year before he died, I spent a week or two visiting while he worked. It was just the three of us and we spent most of the time talking, his goggles perched on top of his grey dreads, waiting, the welding iron in his hand, raised but paused. And that’s how I’ll remember him. Javas in his tattered blue overalls, goggles up, arm about to strike, talking shit about something I can longer recall, but with a shine in his eye that lit the room – the same shine that always lit my heart.
His last little pieces were all personal refuge. Javas was disturbed by how the giants had become such literal symbols of us, the parents, which they were never meant to be. He protested their use outside the expo centre, and ultimately it was his lack of power in the debate, I believe, that hurt him the most. The arguments with Sthembiso went long into the night and there was never a chance of victory, or even compromise. The giants were us. We were the giants. The expo centre was our story, told again and again and again until we were living dogma, referred to reverentially, but also completely in the past tense. We – the creatures who had purposefully spawned this future – were removed from the present.
And so he welded a true set of us, each piece the height of a water bottle and none bearing even a passing resemblance to its source. Gerald, for instance, was
a warrior about to strike, spear raised, face wild. ‘The Gerald we leaned on,’ said Javas. ‘The Gerald we needed.’
Javas died in his studio, razed to ground by a welding flame turned rogue without its father, who had had, we assumed, some kind of stroke or a heart attack. The whole cottage went down. Everything built so carefully gone in an instant. Andile trawled the ashes for what remained and moved into the granny flat on the property next to mine. We are old-age neighbours.
She is the complete opposite of Fats. It’s as if her man’s death has given her more power, more energy. A sharpened vision. She’s brighter and more direct than she used to be. Faster to grab subjects and make them her own, less likely to tolerate the bullshit we all know is bullshit.
So that’s us. Four very old people waiting to die. The young tolerate us at times and venerate us at others, depending on who wants what when. I smile at them all and play up my doddery oldness whenever its appropriate, but the truth is there aren’t many of them I would trust, and there are fewer even that I like. They are enraptured with themselves and the strange forces that are driving them.
A lot – but not all – of my distaste is rooted in their youth. I am of the era when kids of fifteen were kids, not parents and lovers and politicians and scientists and the creators and destroyers of things. Thus I perceive my progeny as dangerous. Their willingness – well, eagerness really – to march onward scares me. And then there are the miracles and the cult of their religion, the details of which I have studiously ignored but the impact of which is inescapable. They are in the thrall of what they call their science, but which I – being the age I am – recognise as superstition and greed and a complete inability to discern hocus-pocus from reason and fact.
Yes, I have raised all my concerns, and no, they have not listened. They do not have the ears. They have eyes instead. Eyes only for more masts and towers, for the addition of more stations and the expanding, stretching, throttling grasp of mobile reception.
If I had any integrity, instead of nattering inanely to Matron’s breasts I would be laying my Madala experiences on the line for all to consider in the rush of their progress, but whenever I think seriously of it I realise that I am too lost in the fog. I swirl between the poles of many possible realities. I am, in other words, no longer completely linear.
Internally, of course, he exists and speaks and guides. A constant, none-too-subtle narrator in my head. He has never left.
I tried to tell Babalwa, just before she went. I held her bony little paw and began a long ramble, intended to lead us to somewhere near the CSIR, intended to open some kind of conversational door that I could slip through, bringing Madala behind me, but she was wise to it. To me. As she always has been.
‘Roy,’ she said, smiling faintly, Jessica Tandy in her last Hollywood years, ‘let it go. We’re nearly there now. There isn’t much more. We have done it. Everything that was possible. You can let go now, Roy. We are there.’
Near-death bullshit, obviously. The meanderings of the terminal mind, but still her eyes were strong and at the time it made spiritual, death-like sense. And so I stopped and bottled what I needed to tell her, only to regret it intensely when she had actually gone. Fucking Babalwa.
‘You know she always loved you,’ Fats said, sobbing on my shoulder.
‘The little bitch.’ I patted his head as gently as I could. He snorted a river back up his nose and choked on it as he laughed, muck spraying back out onto my shoulder.
‘Seriously, Roy. She asked me to tell you. Again. How much she regretted …’
I stroked his greasy old hair vigorously and patted his shoulder. ‘Nah nah nah …’ I looped it like a soothing baby mantra. ‘I know it, I know it. Knew it years ago.’
One of the kids – the doctor – told us it was some kind of pneumonia that took her. ‘But at that kind of age,’ he tutted and shook his head. There was no need to explain. We all smiled hopelessly and let him go. I wondered where and how he had studied. How any kind of knowledge could possibly have taken shape already in that little head. I marvelled also at his white coat – the arrogance of it.
Anyway, that was a few years ago and now there’s just me and Camille, with support from Beatrice and Andile. Gerald was lost up north many years back, and Fats is mostly mad. He spends his time wringing his hands and looking in the folds of his wrinkles for his wife. Recently he started charging the corners, like Tebza.
Camille sits in the sun as it breaks through the trees. Generally she does this until shortly before noon. In summer she seeks out the dappled patches, using the shade to make sure her head is protected from the heat. She moves systematically through the morning to catch the optimum mix of dapple and sun. Every now and again she’s forced to retreat into the shade to cool off. In midsummer she’ll lie in the shade while making sure a paw or two has basic contact with the sun, like she’s lightly touching a cable to a battery. In winter she hunts the heaviest rays and is resolute. She stares directly into the source and captures all of the available power on her chest. She maintains a permanent blink, her eyes paper-thin slits against the glare. Thereafter, depending on the type of day, she’ll find somewhere to pass out. If the sun is absent she barely rises at all, lifting her head only to eat.
I’ve tried to mimic her in my later years. Minimum fuss. Maximum utility. A strong warmth and stroking orientation. After much experimentation I can confirm that it is a good life. A simple life too.
At this advanced age there is no larger meaning for me. I have done all I was ever going to do – and perhaps a bit more, thanks to the novelty of circumstance. I see the world as far bigger, more frightening and more strange than ever before. Today, the simple notion of moving beyond the outer perimeter of the farm is as exotic and strange as one of those French movies. Something fascinating to contemplate, to swirl around in the mind, but not ever to actually get involved in, or really understand.
I didn’t expect to be so benign in my last years. I pictured myself forcing death to wait, somewhere beyond the gate (ah, the fantasies of middle age). Now that I am here I understand that the search for sun and warmth has as much value – more even – than any other endeavour. This I have learned mostly from Camille, who is absolutely calm in her enjoyment of each day, of each rotating moment within it.
Of course, as the sun’s rays heat me I toy with life after death, life on other planets, the various options thrown up by Madala’s muddy presence. As my body temperature rises and my skin warms and my insides glow and I watch Camille, shining and pulsating in the sun, anything – any damn thing – seems not only completely possible but really quite likely. In a world where this kind of warmth can infiltrate beings such as cats and humans, what, ultimately, is not possible?
But then the sun moves and I find a blanket and she finds a heap of something to bury herself in and the potential of the morning fades and by the end of it I accept that this is probably all there is, potential aside. In the afternoons my mind runs at high speed through the memory banks, throwing itself back into life. My heart touches the strange and formidable shape that was my father and then courses roughly over the mystery that was my mother, memories blurring so fast that they become a tidal wave of sensations, cascading over and over each other.
I wipe the tears away with surprise. I am always surprised. I think of Angie, wife of another age. My angry, fighting wife. I am struck by how badly I treated her – how willing I was to lash. Oh, the fights we had. The savage, ego-ridden fights. Embarrassing. Humiliating – I now see – for both of us to have sunk that far. I would, I think as I stroke Camille’s white fur, really value the opportunity to go back and put my hand on her cheek and let it rest there in the love I genuinely did feel for her.
But I can’t.
CHAPTER 58
Who do you love?
Matron was layered. She moved through the world and her tasks in it – walking me, wiping Fats’s ass, dealing with the boils and pimples of life – via the external, functional lay
er, which was crisp and neutral and resolute. You couldn’t shake her circumstantially. In this incarnation she had the ability to disperse calm as if handing out pills. Her presence was, in itself, the pill.
But the longer I knew her – after months, then years, of shuffling by her side – I came to recognise the complexities. On internally sunny days, she was an innate optimist. But when the clouds came, she reverted to fear. Matron, in the dark hours of self, was extremely skittish. Not specifically afraid of this or that, but frightened in general. Of the world around, of the people and of the state of her own little heart.
On Thursdays, church days, holy days, the beat would drive, volume right up, bass cranked, from the early hours, incessant. I was always alone on Thursdays (maybe a visit from Andile or Beatrice, maybe not), and Matron would invariably return in her most delicate incarnation on the Friday. Over time I easily recognised the particular set of her jaw. The grind. Also the fragility of her person. Her lacklustre approach to food, her tendency to lose concentration, the conversation, the activity. Fridays she would flicker and twitch. The exterior motions were consistent, but the right kind of idea would hit her behind her eyes. Once hit, she would scuttle for cover.
Example:
She had her clipboard against her hip and was dressed in a conservative pair of brown office slacks. Her feet were, I still remember now, strangely stockinged inside brown open-toe office loafers. We were considering the height of the bed.